Films of the decade: “Southland Tales”

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 16:22:00 +0000

"Southland Tales," Richard Kelly's epic film about the end of the world, is by no means a perfect film. Characters appear and disappear with little explanation, the plot is muddled to the point of self-parody, and the tone shifts wildly from slapstick comedy to pathos and back again. I saw the film at a late-night, near-empty screening in New York's Angelika Film Center, during which approximately two-thirds of the audience left by the end of the second act. I can't really blame them -- but I can gloat that they missed out on my favorite film of the past decade. From the first appearance of Sarah Michelle Gellar's pop-tart porn star, Krysta Now (with a hit single called "Horniness Is Not a Crime"), to the film's climactic modern-dance routine, I was utterly enraptured by "Southland Tales."

The creepy suspense inside “The Box”

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 01:06:00 +0000

About a third of the way through "The Box," I had a distinct sense-memory flash. For just a moment, I was 10 again, halfway through an episode of Rod Serling's "Night Gallery," a show my older sisters had repeatedly warned me not to watch, and it was too late to turn it off and forget what I'd already seen. Going forward -- something I'd surely regret later, sometime around 3 a.m., when every other human being in the world except me would be sound asleep -- was the only way.

"The Box" isn't as downright chilling as "Night Gallery"; its writer and director, Richard Kelly, is clearly going for more of a discomforting "Twilight Zone" vibe, not surprising since the movie is based on a 1970 short story written by Richard Matheson ("Button, Button"), which was in turn adapted into a "Twilight Zone" episode during the show's 1980s incarnation. But the first half of "The Box" -- plus parts of the second -- works as a lyrical summation of everything Kelly, the director of the strange and heartfelt cult hit "Donnie Darko," as well as the more sprawling, confounding, "Southland Tales," is good at: He builds and sustains a complex, indefinable mood, a sense of regret for deeds that haven't even been committed yet; he offers a vision of the past as a concrete place that can be revisited, unironically and not just in our hazy memories; and his visual sense -- from the way he uses the actors' faces to make offhand but resonant observations about morality and conscience, to his portrayal of an airplane hangar as a cavernous, unwelcoming faux-heaven -- is sophisticated without being too fussy.

Salon.com > The Box

Films of the decade: “Southland Tales”

The creepy suspense inside “The Box”